SuperstudioThe First City from Twelve Ideal CitiesPhotolithograph
1971

Twelve Ideal Cities is a wry comment on twentieth-century modernist utopias and it represents, the architects have written, "the supreme achievement of twenty thousand years of civilization." In The First City, or 2,000-Ton City, cubic cells stacked atop one another form a continuous building that stretches across a green, undulating landscape. Each cell is equipped with technology capable of accommodating all human desires and physiological needs. In this city, humans are in a state of equality and death no longer exists, but if an inhabitant tries to rebel against this ideal state, the ceiling of his or her cell will descend with a two-thousand-ton force obliterating the dissenter and making way for a new perfect citizen, This dystopian scenario originated in a critique of modern ideals of planning, rationalization, and consumerism; it uses architecture as a device that, like literature, can express political viewpoints about society.

Melville's sardonic answer to the Transcendentalist movement, which produced Thoreau (and Whitman). "You might sit astride a mast and feel your oneness with nature," Melville wrote, "but fall into the sea and you're going to get eaten."